the father, Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Doctor Slop and Susannah run on for three volumes before the child is born, and he doesn't get into his breeches till the sixth volume. The "life and opinions" are thus, as it were, framed in a mystery of obstetrics.
And Sterne seems to say to us that all life is like that: a child just barely learning to walk and smiling midway with exultation as he toddles out of the hands of the midwife and totters into the hands of the sexton.
If life is like that, Sterne concluded in the teeth of all the theologians from whom he had plagiarized, success in life consists not in austere and strenuous activity and still less in the shows of pomp and ceremony, but in expanding to the utmost our consciousness of the smiling interval, in multiplying to the utmost the titillations of moments when birth or death or the beating of a fair grisette's pulse under our fingers or a pair of new black silk breeches or a fricasseed chicken or burgundy or a jeweled snuffbox or a pretty act of kindness or a letter from our mistress has given us a childish joy. If life is like that, says Sterne, let us follow our happy and our pathetic impulses, "as the fly stings"—on the spur of the moment—a dreadful notion, of course, unless our first impulses are indeed better than our discreet and cautious second thoughts.
How is it, madam, in your case, and in yours, sir?
Sterne approved the first spontaneous flow of his feelings, and so, to supply his own long-felt want, he invented the word "sentimental" and put it into circulation. He elaborated, if he did not invent, sentimental relations, and he made an ideal of the life of "sensibility." In "Tristram Shandy," in "A Senti-
